Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.
ROLLO MAYMemory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.
More Rollo May Quotes
-
-
Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.
ROLLO MAY -
The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.
ROLLO MAY -
Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.
ROLLO MAY -
Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death.
ROLLO MAY -
Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.
ROLLO MAY -
Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.
ROLLO MAY -
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
ROLLO MAY -
All our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.
ROLLO MAY -
People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.
ROLLO MAY -
This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity and from this our own heroism is molded.
ROLLO MAY -
Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.
ROLLO MAY -
Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.
ROLLO MAY -
A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.
ROLLO MAY -
One does not become fully human painlessly.
ROLLO MAY -
Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us?
ROLLO MAY -
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
ROLLO MAY -
The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
ROLLO MAY -
The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.
ROLLO MAY -
A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.
ROLLO MAY -
In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.
ROLLO MAY -
What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.
ROLLO MAY -
It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.
ROLLO MAY -
There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.
ROLLO MAY -
Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.
ROLLO MAY -
The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.
ROLLO MAY -
So courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
ROLLO MAY